If you read our news, it is very likely that you have some form of
interest for information technologies and as such, it is equally
likely you heard about the infamous Intel vulnerabilities known
as Spectre
and Meltdown
along with the tremendous cohort of processors they impact.

Needless to say, TuxFamily had a look at these issues in particular.
And, like many other companies and associations, we wondered
"what's next?". After all, despite their well-deserved media coverage,
Spectre and Meltdown are but successors to row hammer
and INTEL-SA-00086
and surely, things cannot end here, right? It felt natural to
conclude that we have recently entered some form of dark period,
the extent of which ought to be counted in years, characterised by
a strong focus of all security-related I.T. professionals on hardware
vulnerabilities. Basically, everything we discovered (vulnerabilities),
learnt, improved and strove to prevent (good design and coding
practices, security audits, peer reviews, etc.) in the latest 20 years
is to be done again in the realm of hardware. Another way to put it is:
one way or another, we are probably going to be betrayed by every
existing piece of I.T. hardware in the coming years. It would be
tempting to detail what would (and hopefully will) put an end to this
era of misery, but this is not the point of this piece of news.

The main point is: TuxFamily is moving out of x86 processors. For
various reasons, we cannot afford to wait until every piece of
hardware was deemed a threat to our mutualised infrastructure.
Instead, we have to move on, even if that implies to design our own
machines. And guess what? This is exactly what we intend to do, thanks
to our main sysadmin also being a professional electronics engineer.
After further investigations about what sounded like a crazy idea at
first, we eventually found the perfect brick to start building the
perfect architecture TuxFamily had never dared to dream about.
And this brick happens to be... the glorious TMS5100!

Surely, we do not expect all of our beloved hostees to react to that
technical name. But we surely expect our plan to suddenly make a lot
more sense after we rephrase it this way: we intend to rebuild
TuxFamily's infrastructures based on Speak & Spell devices!

Think about it: thanks to their simple design (no notion of rings, no
fancy MMU, etc.), not a single hardware vulnerability has ever been
registered for these chips. That's right, not a single human ever
had to utter "ah, crap, we have to handle the TMS5100 F00F bug
ASAP". THAT is what we call "reliable foundations".

And this is where we need you! As of today, all of this remains a
theoretical project; we are light-years, if not parsecs, away from our
goal. To bootstrap this engineering endeavour, we do not need money
(we still have plenty since the association officially moved to the
Cayman islands) but we need a total of 3,261 Speak & Spell devices.
Alas, we only have 1 for the moment (well, technically, we have two,
but a member of the staff refused to let go of his device, claiming
it was sacred and he was still using it on a daily basis and we had
no right to take it by force and we would have to write our damn
news ourselves if we did so). We have no doubt that some of you still
have such devices in their basement and are willing to help us achieve
hardware independence. Therefore, please quickly mail us your
Speak & Spell devices to the following address:

With your help, we should be able to replace our infrastructures in a
matter of just a few years. Of course, hostees should expect a
transition period marked by very slight losses of performance compared
to the current infrastructure. But surely, this almost painless
transition should be long buried and forgotten by the time the I.T.
hardware industry put their products back on track with regards to
security.

Edit:
as many of you had guessed, it was of course our traditional April Fools'
prank.
As severe as hardware vulnerabilities can be, we are too lazy to design and
build our own hardware and therefore do not actually need your
Speak & Spell devices.
If by chance you insist on sending us your Speak & Spell,
please contact us to get our actual postal address; indeed, the one
mentioned above is based on Santa Claus' postal address (the French variant
transposed in Paris to be specific) and none of you wants to mess with Santa's
after-sales service, right?